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Brought to you by the creators of Sound Waves, The Great Australian Schwa helps you understand and identify the schwa (or /ə/) sound through a clever Aussie-themed rhyme. The schwa is the most common vowel sound in English. If you’re working with words containing more than one syllable, you’re bound to come across this sound. Unfortunately, it also takes the crown for being the most difficult sound to identify and spell.

Share this engaging animation with your colleagues and embrace this tricky sound in your synthetic phonics spelling lessons.

The schwa is just one of the 43 sounds (phonemes) taught in Sound Waves. Sound Waves is a systematic synthetic phonics and word study program designed to develop reading, spelling and writing skills through phonemic awareness.

Synthetic phonics uses a sound-to-letter approach, which acknowledges that sounds can be represented in more than one way in written form. By focusing first on the basic units of sound (phonemes), then the single lette